Hello and welcome to summer 2024
Reading After Custody
As readers arrive at the end of the eighth installment of Custody and the Epilog - there are two more months of related materials on this page. July will contain reflections on reading. August will look at Custody for Book Club members.
July 2024 Summertime Reading
Summertime is Reading Time
Reading to, and with, Children
Reading to, and with, Children
PHOTO CREDIT: Random House
Summer is a great time to read . . . to begin reading . . . to pick up the reading habit again . . . to introduce a child or an adult to the wonder and imaginative kick available from books.
Since many devoted readers of Custody are still working their way through the final installment and epilog, due to their longer-than-usual page count, I wanted to share this month how others have celebrated reading and books.
Here are five stimulating articles,
one for each week of July, and one website about the power of volunteerism for promoting reading and availability of books in reading deserts or famines.
Please feel not just free—but invited and empowered—to share these with family and friends, book club members, your local librarian. Make 2024’s summer a great jump start for books and betterment.
How To Be A Better Reader
https://www.nytimes.com/explain/2022/how-to-be-a-better-reader
NY Times editor Tina Jordan provides a hugely practical guide for starters or experienced readers of either printed or electronic books. Her suggestion is: “Want to sleep better, be smarter and more empathetic? Try picking up a book. There’s a lot more between those pages than just stories.”
Social Media or Book Reading
https://qz.com/895101/in-the-time-you-spend-on-social-media-each-year-you-could-read-200-books
You’ll love Charles Chu writing his on-line essay in Quartz, where he claims: “That decision to start reading was one of the most important decisions in my life.” His experience demonstrates a staggering relationship between choosing reading over social media viewing.
Bronx NY Teacher Invites Author to his High School Classroom
(See link above with photo)
Treat yourself to a great story of an editor and author invited by a NYC school teacher to open up the world of words for his students. A related NY Times treatment has a recording of the article. I recommend it -- to get a fuller introduction by Elisabeth Egan explaining that: “It’s not often that an author walks into a room full of readers, let alone teenagers, who talk about characters born in his imagination as if they’re living, breathing human beings. And it’s equally rare for students to spend time with an author whose fictional world feels like a refuge.” (At the time of my posting, the link for the March 18, 2024 essay was broken. I hope it is restored). https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/books/tommy-orange-there-there-wandering-stars.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3k0.c5hf.E0RFHHWvOe4W&smid=em-share
Teaching Reading in School
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/opinion/us-school-reading.html
Ms. Emily Hanford is a senior education correspondent for American Public Media. In this challenging opinion essay she reflects on a popular method of teaching children to read in public schools, and why she finds fault with it. Her basic tenet resides in her opening paragraph:
“The most important thing schools can do is teach children how to read. If you can read, you can learn anything. If you can’t, almost everything in school is difficult. Word problems. Test directions. Biology homework. Everything comes back to reading.”
Literacy and Reading Increases in the Gulf States
Please read this story behind the headline that caught my attention earlier this year while writing Custody: “Mississippi went from being ranked the second-worst state in 2013 for fourth-grade reading to 21st in 2022. Louisiana and Alabama, meanwhile, were among only three states to see modest gains in fourth-grade reading during the pandemic, which saw massive learning setbacks in most other states.”
Reading to, and with, Children
Reading to, and with, Children
Reading to, and with, Children
As I wrote Custody, I found myself circling back to my own introduction to reading—as a kid and as a parent.
To provide ammunition for Rosalyn’s sinister purposes and to find seedlings for Mrs. Steadman’s more traditional pedagogy, I finger-walked the spines and page-turned many volumes on my personal bookshelves and those at two local libraries, supplementing each with on-line searches and the state-wide loaning network of other towns' and cities’ public depositories of schemes and dreams bound in print.
Clearly my choices were dated, since they were all published before or during my childhood and prior to the 1992 timeline of Happydale’s classrooms. Hopefully, as you read (or are reading) Custody, you were reminded of books that were part of your introduction to reading and that you still hold with fond memories. Here’s two resources to carry on those traditions today . . .
Summer Adventures to Read with Kids and Grandkids
This (6.30.24) weekend’s NY Times Book Review features an idea-laden-and-illustrated thrill. Let writer and editor Elisabeth Egan introduce you to six books you'll love reading to, and with, young children being introduced to the fun and excitement and imaginative world of reading.
After full days of fun and play at home or on vacation, as summer’s evenings turn to dream-filled sleepy nights, here’s a set of treasures Egan recommends for parents and grandparents that will make summer 2024 a season to remember and cherish.
And for those rainy days, try a trip to the local library reading room or a nearby independent bookseller.
To quote Ms. Egan, "From silly rhymes to lively sound effects to stealthily-building suspense, these old standbys and new classics have something for everyone."
Book Fairies – A Hugely Successful Literacy Program
“As we look ahead, we are filled with optimism and excitement for the future. Our efforts to distribute books and promote literacy continue to grow, and we are constantly inspired by the stories of transformation and empowerment that come from those we serve.”
That’s the message from Executive Director Eileen Minogue on New York’s Long Island, to open the Summer 2024 newsletter of the non-profit that has distributed 4,713,931 BOOKS since 2012—Book Fairies.
This volunteer-driven, donation-based community program will inspire you to contribute to its success, or perhaps even to duplicate it in other parts of the country.
Meet Maria Tatar
Reading to, and with, Children
Meet Maria Tatar
Or let yourself get lost and then re-discovered in a more formal landscape
Enchanted Hunters
the power of stories in childhood
by Maria Tatar
When it comes to studying about folklore and mythology, there is no one whose insights and information I prefer and enjoy more than those of Dr. Maria Tatar. No one’s books and articles have taught me more about storytelling and reading than hers.
This book is the one I most recommend for starting to read Tatar’s work. It is the one that most addresses the broader themes of reading and storytelling so fundamental to my novel Custody.
Dr. Tatar complements her discussion in Enchanted Hunters with selective historical images by other artists or photographers to illustrate principles and themes she communicates so convincingly.
I have often found when reading her book that even when she incorporates a fact or idea I knew about before, I am repeatedly astounded by how much more she sees and teaches me about that particular fact or idea, within a richer and fuller historical or literary context than I previously understood or appreciated.
Here's a sampling of the chapter sub-titles to give you an idea where this book can take you:
Storytelling and the Invention of Bedtime Reading . . . Can Books Change Us? . . . Brushes with Death . . How to Do Things with Words . . . What Words Can Do to You?
I return to this book so often that I have a personal copy I keep in my workspace and have no hesitancy about making notes within. Dr. Tatar has included a helpful index, as well as an annotated set of end notes, arranged chapter by chapter, and cross referenced in the index.
And here’s a spectacular bonus!
This volume includes a magnificent thirty-five page Appendix titled “Souvenirs of Reading: What We Bring Back.” It presents thoughtful snippets by almost one hundred well known persons from many walks of life, nations, cultures, genders, and ages. In these credited reminiscences by scientists, public figures, writers, philosophers, and historians you’ll find so many inspirational reflections that speak to you directly.
For example, as I look to share away so many volumes of books in my personal library at this point in life, so others can find in them the joys and challenges I have, I am struck by what Virginia Woolf is quoted as writing: “Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a bookcase change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered.”
* * * *
The chapter in another of Dr. Tatar’s books, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, from which Rosalyn Lowry quotes to her disastrously upended adult book club is “Spinning Tales.” Tatar’s reflection on “Rumpelstiltskin” is an example of her characteristic writing and teaching style I have come to admire. These pages are suitable for an academic reader and researcher. But the exact same treatment is completely accessible to casual readers of folklore and fairy tales—whether considering the story for their own reading as an adult or for their narrative activity of reading to children.
Enchanted Hunters © 2009, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, New York, NY
Hard Facts . . . © 1987 Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ